She smiled back. “Perhaps I should have fed you even more.”
He laughed. “Perhaps all the blood is in my stomach, digesting that feast, leaving nothing in my head to help me think.”
She had another idea about where that blood had rushed to.
“I suppose,” he said, heaving a sigh, “we should be getting back. Your father might worry.”
Willa waved that away. “No, we’re fine. The Bar-O’s a big spread. Papa will expect me to give you the nickel tour.”
Zachary helped her pack up the picnic things, the folded blanket going in on top. They left the basket with their tree-tied horses, and they walked along the sandy, rocky shore, just taking in the scenic beauty.
At one point the Easterner stopped and she stopped, too, looking back at him. You could almost hear the water shimmer.
“I need to apologize,” he said. “Not for how I feel. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is for me to feel this way about a woman again. You’ve brought something alive in me that has been dead for... for a very long time.”
“Zachary...”
“But I do apologize for... well, I know that things are moving too fast. But I’ve always been the kind of person who moves quickly to get what he wants.”
She looked into the dark, almost Oriental eyes, and said, “I’m that kind of person, too.”
He sighed, looked away, almost shyly. But then his gaze came back to her, hard and clear. “When the time is right,” he said, “I want to talk to your father.”
“About the ranch?”
“No.” He shook his head. “That’s all but decided. We’ll be going over the legal documents soon. No, I need to talk to him about... us.”
He might have tried to kiss her again, and she might have let him.
But he didn’t, and she didn’t encourage it. They just walked back to where the calico and Appaloosa waited.
Walked back hand in hand.
When he lost a hand because he wasn’t paying attention, Caleb York decided it was time to throw in his cards — even though he was fifty-some dollars ahead. Two hours of poker, here at the Victory on another slow weeknight, had failed to keep his mind off his long, mostly unsuccessful day.
The day had started well, the interviews with bank president Thomas Carter and janitor Charley Morton, giving York a good idea of just how Herbert Upton came to die.
Before he met his Maker, the clerk had met his boss.
Carter had arranged to have his own bank held up, either to cover up embezzlement or simply to line his pockets with the townspeople’s money. Upton had been an accomplice or perhaps a blackmailer — either way, it explained the clerk’s recent promotion and raise.
So after hours, with no one else in the bank, Carter had shoved a pistol into Upton’s belly and ended whatever problems the clerk had been causing. The bank president waited for the right moment — the sun had probably still been up when the murder was done — and after dark dragged Upton behind the Victory and dumped him in the alley there.
And janitor Charley had been woken up early before the bank opened the next day, honored by the president’s presence on so lowly a doorstep, to come right now and clean up a sticky mess. Spilled food indeed.
As murders went, it was hardly the cleverest the ex — Wells Fargo detective had run into. If anything, the crime was a fairly clumsy one. But proving Carter guilty would take real doing. You didn’t go around accusing one of the most respected city fathers of a cold-blooded killing, much less the robbery of his own bank, without utterly damning evidence. The circumstantial variety would never swing it.
So York had spent the late morning and the afternoon into early evening doing the kind of dogged, dull investigative work of which the dime novelists spared their readers. He talked to damn near everyone in town, at least those whose living quarters were above the Main Street businesses. He, of course, never mentioned the bank president’s name, merely asked whether anyone had heard a shot fired, or seen anything suspicious — say, someone hauling along a drunken friend somewhere. When he first got to the Victory this evening, York went around asking the same questions to the sparse clientele.
No one had heard anything.
No one had seen anything.
Nothing in the world pulls a lawman down worse than not being able to prove a guilty man guilty.
Dressed in his usual black, hat pushed back on his head, York had taken off his badge when he sat down at the poker table — always his habit, but somehow more significant tonight, perhaps because he was allowing himself to drink a little harder than usual. Before taking his seat at the poker table, in fact, he’d asked Rita to make sure he got the good stuff.
“Drinking yourself blind is one thing,” York told her, with a nasty grin, “but going blind is something else again.”
Rita, in a green satin gown with its usual low-cut front and up-the-middle slit, looked like a bowl of ripe fruit ready for the eating. But something in her face, especially around her dark eyes, seemed troubled.
“I always,” she said, with a patient smile, “make sure you get the private stock. Straight from Denver.”
“Thanks, honey.”
She blinked at the familiarity. “Have you started drinking already, Sheriff?”
“No. Just a long damn day. Just a chasin’-my-tail wasted day.”
She glanced around, though there were few patrons or even employees to see on this dead night. Then her eyes locked on his and she said, “I’d like to talk. Later.”
“Sure. We can talk now if it’s important.”
He was aware that she lived on the premises, in the largest of the rooms upstairs.
She shook her head. “No. Enjoy yourself. Play some cards. Take a load off.”
At Rita’s nod, Hub the bartender gave York a bottle and a glass.
But during the time he sat playing cards — the ruffled-shirt house dealer accommodated him and played seven-card stud instead of the usual five-card — York had not put a dent in the bottle. Oh, it was the good stuff, all right, and no matter what Rita said, superior to the usual fare he was served here.
But his mind just would not let him enjoy himself. Wouldn’t let him lose himself in the game, and drink himself into a better mood or for that matter a worse one. Two hours of this nonsense was enough.
When he rose, he glanced around for Rita, ready to have that talk with her. But she was nowhere to be seen. York went over to the counter and asked Hub if she was upstairs or in her office, and the bartender said, “No, Sheriff he went out half an hour or so ago.”
“Say where she was going?”
“No. Sometimes she goes out for a walk, to just enjoy the night air. Go back to your game and she’ll turn up soon enough.”
York said no thanks and returned the largely unused bottle to the bartender.
Outside, the night air was nothing anybody would enjoy, not anything to go out walking in willingly — a wind had kicked up, and a cold one at that, and he had to snug his hat down to keep it from flying. The street was deserted, the jangle of his spurs the only sound besides the wind’s hungry-wolf howl. Going on ten, few lights were on in the living quarters over stores, and only the faint glow of de Toro Rojo in the barrio, like a small piece of sunset that refused to go down, indicated anybody but the smattering of souls in the Victory were awake in this town.
At the hotel, the front desk was empty, attended only by a bell and a sign that said RING FOR SERVICE. The chinless clerk would be camped out in the office behind the wall of keys. The restaurant was dark, closed; the hotel, like the town, asleep. On this night, Trinidad was the kind of peaceful hamlet most sheriffs would relish — where a man with a star could pick up a paycheck for doing next to nothing.